Around lunchtime, calls start coming in to the Yeong-Hwa-Ru Chinese restaurant. Mr. Han takes orders over the phone for his takeout-and-delivery place. His deliverymen check out street maps pinned up all over the wall before heading off on their motorbikes.

Finding the customers can be pretty tricky, especially for new drivers, according to Han. “We start off by sending them to nearby places, with really simple directions. Once they get familiar the area, then I’ll send them farther away.”

The problem is South Korea’s century-old street address system. It can be so confusing that even longtime residents often carry maps and GPS devices to find their way around.

Korea’s address system is modeled on Japan’s, which assigns addresses chronologically instead of geographically; buildings are numbered according to when they were built, not where they’re located on a street.

Directions here usually include a list of landmarks, and maps are often printed on the back of business cards. But this complex system will soon be a thing of the past. South Korea’s is instituting a new address system that the government says will make it easier and quicker to order takeout, send packages and get help in case of an emergency.

The new system is more like those in the West, using a building’s number, street name and city, rather than a neighborhood and lot number. Small blue placards featuring new addresses have begun appearing on every building around the country. The government will allow use of both old and new systems until December 2013. After that, the old addresses will be abandoned.

Not everyone here is so pleased with the change. Some of the strongest opposition comes from Buddhists. Monks at Seoul’s Jogye Temple petitioned the government to hold off on the new system.

“In our country there are areas and roads that are closely related to Buddhism,” said a monk named To-gyoung. He said the new system drops some neighborhood names that are important to Buddhist tradition. “We feel like we’re losing our heritage.”

“The monks don’t oppose the new system in general,” said To-gyoung. “They just want the streets and neighborhoods with Buddhist names to be left alone.”

Officials at South Korea’s Ministry of Public Administration and Security, the agency in charge of the new addresses, declined to be interviewed. But a spokeswoman said that the ministry is still working out the kinks.

Beyond the monks, many other Koreans aren’t so sure if Western-style building numbers will make their lives any better.

Taxi driver Hong Jae-do punches an address into his dashboard-mounted GPS navigator. He’s still waiting for maps with the new addresses to come out.

“I haven’t started using the new system yet, so I can’t be sure if it really will make a difference. But even when the maps do come out, I’ll still use my GPS to find where my customers need to go.”

70-year-old Yeon-il, who owns a teahouse in a small alley in one of Seoul’s busy tourist neighborhoods, said she’s glad to see the old system go.

“The old address system did make it hard for people to find my shop — they sometimes walked right by it.” But Yeon-il went on to say that there are many small alleys in her neighborhood and all around the country. “If people couldn’t find what they were looking for under the old system, they probably won’t be able to find it now, no matter what numbers appear by the front door.”

We’d like to know where else, in the universe of technology podcasts, you can find an episode that includes Swedish high-tech skiing treadmills, a soccer ball that stores enough energy during play to power an LED light (pictured), a reporter who “embeds” with some tekkies who want to keep information flowing into and out of Iran, and a WTP listener who is running…wait for it…a global project designed to crowdsource design ideas for rebuilding Haiti. I mean, seriously. We’ve got all of this in this episode of The World’s Technology Podcast. Before I give you the links for the episode, let me just take a minute and ask you to spread the word about the podcast. Tell your friends, or enemies. Tweet us, share us on Facebook, and/or blog about us. We need you to help the podcast grow, to help us reach new audiences. We know we’re an acquired taste — tell your friends to nibble a little bit. Who knows? They might even get hooked on us.

Anyway. Here are some relevant links from episode 277:

• Blog: Sweden’s skiers see high-tech training advantage
• Video: Swedish high-tech skiing treadmill
• Pictures: Using RTK GNSS to measure the cross-country course in Whistler
• sOccket homepage
• Jim Witkin’s NYT blog post on the sOccket
• More on Austin Heap
• Mark Dytham, Astrid Klein and Pecha Kucha for Haiti

OK, so here’s also a link to the new Talking Travel podcast with Lonely Planet that I mentioned at the top of the show.

We’re on Twitter and Facebook. You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS.

• Video: The Swedish high-tech skiing treadmill (via Swedish TV)
• More pictures from the global positioning work in Whistler

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: The 2010 Winter Olympics get underway this Friday in Vancouver.  For the athletes the Games will be the culmination of years of training.  And for members of Sweden’s cross country ski team, some of that training involved a state of the art skiing treadmill.  Here’s more from The World’s technology correspondent, Clark Boyd.

CLARK BOYD: The Swedish Winter Sport Research Center has a simple goal, harness all manner of biomechanical research and technology to help Swedish athletes excel.  The center is prepared to go to some lengths to do it.  This is from a Swedish TV report, a cross country skier prepares for training.  That’s the sound of a giant treadmill starting up.  Yes, the skier is indoors.  He’s using a pair of roller skis on the treadmill.  Meanwhile, a very realistic video of the cross country course in Canada plays on the monitor in front of him.  What the Swedes have created isn’t virtual reality, but it is about as close to skiing Whistler as you can get and not be there.

MIKAEL SWAREN:  You know where you are, you recognize where you are and you can visualize what it’s going to be like during the Olympics.

BOYD: That’s Mikael Swaren, a biomechanics expert at the Swedish Winter Sports Research Center.  He’s part of a team that designed and programmed the special treadmill.  One unique feature involves speed.  Unlike a runner on a regular treadmill, skiers don’t use up and down buttons to set their pace.  Instead, the program adjusts the speed automatically based on the skier’s own movements.

SWAREN:  When we started thinking about it, we also realized that it would be even better to be able to ski, if you could adjust the speed yourself, that means that you could easily ski a track.

BOYD: But that meant, first and foremost, getting incredibly accurate measurements of the course in Whistler.  Regular GPS wasn’t good enough.  So, the researchers decided to use something called a real time Kinematics Global Navigation Satellite System.  Matej Supej used the system to take the measurements of the course at Whistler.

MATEJ SUPEJ:  This is a very accurate type of global navigation system which actually uses both the Russian and the United States GPS system at the same time.

BOYD: Think of it this way, the GPS system in your car is probably accurate to a few feet.  The system Supej used is accurate to for tenths of an inch.  The team also had skiers get rigged up with equipment to measure their velocities on various parts of the track.  And, says Mikael Swaren, they went one step further.

SWAREN:  When we took the GPS measurements we also videoed it from a snowmobile.

BOYD: Then they brought all this data and footage back to Sweden.  They wrote some sophisticated software and fed it all into the treadmill.

SWAREN:  So now the skiers can come to the research center and they can see the video following them, in front of them on the video screen.  And then they can adjust the speed according to how they want.  So they can, you can play around and they can go back and ski the same hill a few times over and over again and see what it feels like.

BOYD: At every stride, the skier keeps his or her own pace, and that’s great, the researchers say, for mental preparation.  Skiers will have a sense of how tired they’re likely to feel at various points on the real course.  One thing the treadmill can’t do, of course, is recreate the snow conditions.  The other thing it can’t do, says Mikael Swaren, is turns.  Sure you can see the turns on the video, but the treadmill itself is always pointing straight ahead.

SWAREN:  So if you see any Swedes skiing straight into the woods, then you know that they’ve been on the treadmill too much.

BOYD: You’ll be able to judge the effectiveness of the Swedish treadmill training for yourself.  The Olympic cross country events start next Monday.  For The World, this is Clark Boyd.

WERMAN: You can see pictures and a video of that treadmill in action at the world dot org.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• Haiti Open Street Map
• Ushahidi for Haiti
• Google Person Finder: Haiti Earthquake
• iPhone app for Haiti Disaster Relief

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  Another thing that’s slowed down the relief effort is the lack of reliable maps of Haiti.  But some mapping professionals have volunteered their services.  They’ve managed to pull together a good map of Haiti, post-earthquake, that’s available online to anyone who needs it.  The World’s Clark Boyd reports.

CLARK BOYD:  Open Street Map is a collaborative project to create a map of the world that anyone can edit.  It launched in 2005, the same year that Google launched its mapping service.  But unlike Google’s effort, Open Street Map or OSM as it’s called is made up entirely of volunteers and in the hours after the Haiti earthquake, those volunteers quickly sprang into action.  The years of political instability and economic hardship in Haiti had left geographers without much in the way of reliable, up to date information.

ANDREW TURNER:  There was no road data on the ground.  No one had any maps and so in terms of being able to respond and understand where roads and infrastructure were, there just was no data.

BOYD:  Andrew Turners is an OSM contributor in Arlington, Virginia.

TURNER:  So Open Street Map immediately after the event started gathering together first a lot of historic maps so a lot of 1980’s, 1990 paper maps of roads and infrastructure and started using a lot of these open tools to start tracing over those historic maps.  Then as the satellite providers started putting out satellite imagery, a lot of volunteers of Open Street Map made that imagery available as more layers.

BOYD:  Crisis response teams and aid groups are now downloading OSM’s Haiti map onto their GPS units.  There’s even a specially designed iphone app for OSM’s Haiti map.  Another group using OSM’s Haiti map is Ushahidi.  That’s a site that collects web, email and text message reports from Haiti.  Those reports are then embedded in an interactive version of OSM’s map on Ushahidi’s website.  The Red Cross, FEMA and the U.S. Coast Guard are all putting that data to good use.  Patrick Meier is director of crisis mapping at Ushahidi.  He cites the example of an orphanage in Jacmel that sent in a message saying they needed water.

PATRICK MEIER:  This report was posted on Ushahidi and then later a local NGO responded on the report, online and said we’re taking care of it, we’ve just dispatched 20 liters of water so in many, many respects, Haiti, I think, definitely marks a turning point in humanitarian response, thanks in part to the technologies that have been able to connect people in near real time in a network fashion.

BOYD:  One person who has been watching the Haiti disaster response closely is Ken Banks.  Banks runs an open-source text messaging platform called Frontline SMS.  The platform’s been used in many emergency situations, although it’s not currently in use in Haiti.  Banks says the sure scale of destruction in Haiti makes it almost the worse case scenario for putting tech to work in relief efforts.

KEN BANKS:  The entire infrastructure of the country collapsed and it was impossible to connect to anybody and really get the sense of what was going on.  There was no power, the mobile networks were down so I think things that have been used to try and rectify the situation here and things that have worked, could be very useful or interesting models to study and to determine whether or not this could be used as a template for other future scenarios.

BOYD:  Haiti’s future will at least include a good map.  Again, Open Street Map’s Andrew Turner.

TURNER:  Every piece of data in Open Street Map will be available during the recovery, continued to be updated and made available afterwards so it’s beyond just the immediate response recovery but as rebuilding over several years, this is a map data that Haiti can always be seen as complete, never has to go through having a blank map again.

BOYD:  For The World, this is Clark Boyd.

WERMAN:  And we’ve got a link to this post-earthquake map of Haiti at TheWorld.org.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

I think the word “eclectic” would be a good way to describe this week’s podcast. Of course, “freaking cool” would also be another way to describe our stories this week. Rebecca Bray and Britta Riley, right, are a case in point. WTP’s own Cyrus Farivar ran into Britt and Rebecca at this year’s Ars Electronica 2009 festival in Linz, Austria. The theme for the festival this year is “Human Nature,” and it doesn’t get much more human or natural than, well, waste. Britt and Rebecca, you see, were in Linz to show people how to turn their urine into fertilizer. They’ve got a DIY system to do just that, and they’ll walk Cyrus, and you, through it on this week’s podcast. Oh, and if you think the urine to fertilizer story fits the Human Nature bill, wait until you hear the other story Cyrus unearths in Linz. It’s called The Earth Angel, and it’s proof that the need to go green has pushed into new territory. In this case, the erm, “adult sex toy” industry. Oh, let’s not be prudish. The Earth Angel is a wind-up vibrator. Cyrus and fellow tech reporter Sonja Bettel, an Austrian herself, give it (a very platonic) test run on the podcast.

A couple of podcasts ago, I told you about a cool project by some cyclists in San Francisco. They’re using GPS and other technologies to map out routes around San Francisco. Not just any routes, though. When they ride the route, the software draws that route on a map. The drawing, if done right, turns out to be, in this case, some well known Atari characters. In my excitement, I may have made it seem like this is something new. Not so, and long-time listener Brett Stalbaum let me know it. Brett teaches computers in the visual arts at UC-San Diego. So, I invited him on the podcast to give us the low-down on the great mash-ups between GPS and art. Brett’s done some really cool stuff himself, as you can see. Thanks to Brett for agreeing to be on the podcast, and for setting me straight.

And we end with the beginning of the podcast, actually. Reporter Akiko Fujita tells us about a student project at the University of Nagasaki. Students and their professors are collecting the memories of those who survived the U.S. atomic bomb strike in August of 1945. The idea is to recreate, in 3D, what the Urakami neighborhood of Nagasaki looked like before the war. Here’s the video I promised:

Remember, we’re on Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed!

Click here for a large Google Earth image of “walking in circles”

[nggallery id=7]

This week’s technology podcast begins with a tribute to Les Paul, who was not only a master guitarist, but a master craftsman. He’s the man who did the pioneering work behind the single-body electric guitar. If you’re a fan of rock-n-roll, you’d be hard pressed to think of a more important piece of technology. Mr. Paul, who died this week at the age of 94, also had a role to play in many other technological innovations that shaped the sound of the music we love today. Where would we be without multi-tracking, people?

The podcast rolls on with a look at some French builders who are getting positively medieval in their quest to build, from scratch, a castle. That’s right. They’re using only 13th century tools, technologies and techniques to bring to life the Guedelon Chateau in Burgundy, France. The World’s Gerry Hadden reports, and takes pictures! Seriously, follow that link and check out the squirrel cage. Not to be missed.

From old school, to new school, we then hear about Bertrand Piccard’s dream — which is called Solar Impulse. In short, he and his associates want to build a solar-powered airplane. And not just any solar-powered airplane, but rather one that can fly, non-stop, around the world. Thanks to the BBC’s Jonathan Fildes for sending in that interview from the recent TED conference in Oxford, England.

Then, a short item on an interesting little project unveiled in London this week: the driverless car…er, pod. Or something. They certainly can’t make getting into or out of Heathrow Airport any worse, right?

And we end the show with yet more proof that the show is as much yours as mine. Longtime WTP fan Vicente Montelongo wrote in to tell me about an interesting little art/technology/exercise project he and his buddies in San Francisco are doing. Call it GPS Art, or Geo-spatial drawing, or…something. They map out a route through the streets, then have their GPS app track them as they run the route on their bikes. The result? Well, to date, a lot of great geo-spatial pieces of art that look exceedingly like beloved Atari characters. Check it.

Also, see this article in the New York Times.

As always, you can subscribe to us on iTunes or via RSS. We’re on Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed.